Thai's Teaser #5: A Glove Affair

So we were thinking, "What would be a more perfect way to start the day than a puzzle from Thai?".

Answer: "Definitely an obscenely large coffee creamer explosion. But otherwise, absolutely nothing. Let's do a puzzle from Thai."

So, while you're waiting for your eyebrows to grow back, noodle on this oldie-but-goodie...

Cindy, Maggie, Mandy, and Jody crash on a deserted island. In the crash, Cindy, Maggie, and Mandy sustain serious injuries, but luckily for them, Jody's a surgeon (who knew?). Jody did get cuts on her hands, though.

Jody needs to operate on Cindy, Maggie, and Mandy, but only has two (2) pairs of surgical gloves. How can she safely operate on her three patients?

In case you're thinking this, washing the gloves isn't enough, and Jody's not going to operate without gloves on.

Click below to see the answer:

Did you get it? There's no trick about using palm tree fronds or coconuts or salt water to sterilize, blah, blah, blah. You can actually do it.

One way to think about is that with two pairs of surgical gloves, there are actually four glove surfaces: the inside and outside of each glove. So you have to use all four surfaces (one each for Cindy, Maggie, and Mandy and one for Jody).

And here's one way that works:

1. Put one glove on Jody's left hand, and three gloves on Jody's right hand.
2. Operate on Cindy.
3. Invert the now-dirty glove from her right hand onto her left hand. The two glove surfaces that touched Cindy are now against each other on Jody's left hand, and the exposed glove surfaces on both of Jody's hands are still clean.
4. Operate on Maggie.
5. Do the whole invert-a-glove thing from right to left again.
6. Last operation on Mandy!

Now, I have no idea how practical it is to invert a glove onto another hand without contaminating yourself, but we're just gonna assume that Jody's got the hand dexterity of a... well... surgeon.